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What Sorak had found in the city of undead was of greater value than any material treasure. He had found a gateway into Sanctuary, the refuge of the Sage, and it was there that he had learned the answers to the questions that had plagued him all his life. It was there that he had found himself, and in the process, came close to losing everything, even his life.
As he stood upon the low and rocky ridge that sheltered the oasis at the edge of the great salt plain, Sorak glanced back toward Ryana, sleeping in her bedroll by their campfire. Together, they had survived the city of undead, and their journey to find the Sage had taken them from their home in the forests of the Ringing Mountains all the way across the harsh and foreboding desert Tablelands. Along the way, they had fought marauders and mercenaries, half-giants and defilers, corrupt aristocrats and paid assassins, and a host of undead warriors. They had even defied the wrath of the Shadow King, Nibenay, himself. They had come a long way from the beginning of their quest and had both sacrificed a great deal to follow the Path of the Preserver. Their lives had changed immeasurably since they had set out on their journey, and as Sorak stood there, the cool night breeze ruffling his long, dark hair, he thought back to how it all had begun.
* * *
From childhood, he had been a tribe of one—a half-breed with a dozen personalities, some male, some female, each with distinctive attributes. A wandering pyreen had found him half dead, alone out in the desert. When the shapechanger realized that his ordeal had fragmented his young mind, she had brought him to the villichi convent, nestied high in an isolated valley of the Ringing Mountains.
The villichi were a sisterhood of warrior priestesses who had vowed to follow the Way of the Druid and the Path of the Preserver. They were women born with fully developed psionic powers, mutants ostracized from their communities. They were taller than most women, broad shouldered and long limbed, and most were marked with albino features—snow-white hair, eyes ranging from palest green or gray to pink, and pale, almost translucent skin that burned easily in the hot Athasian sun. Each year, robed villichi priestesses went out on pilgrimages to search for others of their kind, but never in all the history of Athas had there been a male villichi. In all the years the convent had existed, no male had set foot in its walls.
Though he was male, Sorak was accepted by the high mistress of the convent, both out of her reverence for the pyreen and because she had detected his inborn psionic powers. He was not only an elfling, born of a forbidden union between halfling and elf, he was also a tribe of one, a condition so rare that it was known only among villichi. He was an outcast, as were most villichi, and if he was not villichi himself, then he was as close to being one as any male had ever been. The high mistress took him in and named him Sorak, an elvish word for a nomad who travels alone.
Sorak grew up among the villichi sisterhood. One of them, Ryana, a villichi girl his own age, became his closest friend. They grew up together, played together, trained together in the exotic warrior arts of the villichi, and studied the Way of the Druid. But as they grew older, youthful friendship and affection gave way to love and sexual attraction. And Sorak found himself tormented, torn between his own desires and those of his other personalities.
The female personalities residing in him could accept Ryana as sister or friend, but not as lover, so Sorak left the convent to seek out his destiny and discover the truth of his origins. But Ryana would not be parted from him. When she found out that he had left, she broke her villichi vows, fled the convent in the middle of the night, and followed him out into the desert.
Together, they sought the Sage, the reclusive and mysterious preserver wizard who had embarked upon the long and arduous course of metamorphosis into an avangion, the only creature capable of standing against the power of the dragon kings. Only the magic of the Sage was great enough to help Sorak discover his past, and only preserver magic, which did not destroy the dwindling natural resources of Athas, could cure him of his rare condition. To accept the help of a defiler would have violated everything he had been raised to believe, and would have doomed him to forsake forever the Path of the Preserver. However, in searching for the Sage, Sorak had attracted the attention of the dragon kings and their defiler minions, who regarded the preserver wizard as the sole threat to their power.
In Bodach, Sorak and Ryana faced not only an army of undead, but the murderous champion of the Shadow King, a ruthless killer named Valsavis. They prevailed, but only at great cost. Guided by Kara, a pyreen known as the Silent One, they had found the gateway into Sanctuary in Bodach. It was a magical doorway into another time and place, in an age when Athas was still green. That was the secret of the Sage, and it was why none of the dragon kings had ever been able to find him. They sought him in the present, but he had used his magic to find a refuge in the distant past.
In Sanctuary, Sorak found the answers he had so long sought. He had already deduced that the Sage was the same person once known as the Wanderer, who had chronicled his peregrinations across Athas in a book known as The Wanderer’s Journal. What he had not known was that the preserver wizard was his grandfather.
The Sage cast a spell on Sorak, which enabled him to see into his past. He discovered who his parents were, and what his truename was, and what had become of his people. Through the magic of the Sage, Sorak saw how the Moon Runner tribe of elves had been destroyed by a necromancer called the Faceless One, a defiler wizard hired by Sorak’s halfling grandfather.
However, finding out those answers both set Sorak free and severed him from the only security he had ever really known. The voices of his multiple personas would never speak to him again. The wise, maternal Guardian; the stoic Ranger; the calculating Eyron; the brash and irrepressible Kivara; the beastlike Screech; the gentle, childlike Lyric; and the others… all were gone now. They had joined with the Sage, living on inside him as he entered the next stage of his transformation. The act that empowered the Sage’s evolution also healed Sorak’s fragmented personality, and now Sorak was left feeling more alone than he had ever felt before.
“All living creatures are alone, Sorak,” Ryana told him afterward in an attempt to ease his pain. “That is why they mate and bond in friendship.”
“Yes, I know,” he replied. “But it is one thing to know it, and still another to experience truly
being alone for the first time. I have never known the feeling. For as long as I can remember, I have had the others with me. Now, I feel their absence, the emptiness in my soul. It feels as if a part of me is missing.”
Nor was his multiplicity the only thing he lost.
When he had left the convent, High Mistress Varanna had given him a gift, a wondrous sword named Galdra—the enchanted blade of elven kings. It had been entrusted to her safekeeping by a pyreen elder, who had received it from the hand of Akron himself, last of the ancient line of elven kings. Sorak had not known the nature of the blade’s enchantment when he had received it, but he learned that it would cut through anything, and that other blades would shatter upon contact with its elven steel. He knew, too, that if Galdra fell into the hands of a defiler, its magic blade would shatter—and that was precisely what happened when he fought Valsavis, champion of the Shadow King. When Valsavis seized the sword, a blinding explosion of white light shattered the enchanted blade. Now, all that remained was the hilt and about a foot of broken blade. Of the legend once engraved on it in ancient runes—“Strong in spirit, true in temper, forged in faith”—only the elvish symbols for “Strong in spirit” now remained. A defiler’s hand had touched it, and the enchantment was broken.
* * *
As he stood alone upon the rocky ridge in the first orange-tinted light of dawn, Sorak drew the broken blade from his belt and held it up before him, staring at it as it gleamed with a faint blue eldritch light, the remaining trace energies of the enchantment. Why keep it? It was useless as a sword, and Sorak bore Valsavis’s iron sword now, anyway. But Ryana had insisted that the legend of Galdra still stood for something and could be of use to them. Sorak grimaced wryly as he thought of it.
It was said in the songs of elven bards that whoever bore the sword Galdra was fated to become the Crown of Elves, the ruler who would once again unite the scattered tribes under one king. In his travels, Sorak had encountered elves who had believed that he would be that king, but he wanted no part of any elven crown.
Though his mother had named him Alaron after the long-dead elven king, Sorak felt the name did not belong to him. For as long as he could remember, he had been Sorak, the Nomad, and now that he had finally learned his truename, it did not seem to fit him. He was no elven king, no elven kingmaker.
So why keep the broken blade? Ryana thought it important, as did Kara. “Keep it as a symbol of what you have achieved, and what we struggle for,” the pyreen told him before they parted.
But was it really a symbol of achievement, Sorak wondered, or a symbol of a life left behind? He was no longer a tribe of one, an elfling with a dozen different personalities. Now, he was merely Sorak the elfling, the Nomad, around whom unwanted legends had already sprung up. Such notoriety brought only trouble, and he had enough trouble as it was.
For the first time in his life, he felt alone and vulnerable. Yet, for all that he had lost, he had gained the one thing he had never thought that he could have. Ryana.
He turned his back upon the great salt plain and gazed down the slope into the small oasis where Ryana slept, curled up in her bedroll near the smoking embers of their campfire. He thought back to the day she had declared her love for him. It seemed almost a lifetime ago…
* * *
As usual, after weapons training in the morning, the villichi students went down to the stream to bathe. In a desert world, a running stream was the rarest of luxuries, yet Sorak and his villichi companions took it for granted. The Ringing Mountains around them were covered with thick, old-growth forests, and he spent long days hiking through the lush woods, or running with Tigra by his side, a tigone that had been his constant companion since his childhood.
Instead of joining the others at the lagoon, Sorak and his best friend Ryana wandered off to a special spot a bit farther downstream. As they sat together on a large rock outcropping in the middle of the stream, feeling the coolness of the water rush over them, Ryana told him how she felt. “Sorak… there is something I have been meaning to ask you—”
“I know what you are going to ask. I have known for some time.” He had seen it coming and had dreaded the moment when she would finally give voice to her feelings. She had known he was a tribe of one, but because his other personalities all spoke with his male voice, she had not suspected that some of them were female, and he had been afraid to tell her. When she learned the truth at last, it took her completely by surprise.
